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Tornado Alley
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Tornado Alley is a colloquial term most often used in reference to the area of the United States in which tornadoes are most frequent. Although an official location is not defined, the areas in between the Rocky Mountains and Appalachian Mountains are the areas usually associated with it.
ough no state is entirely free of tornadoes, they are most frequent in the plains between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains.
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Encyclopedia
Tornado Alley is a colloquial term most often used in reference to the area of the United States in which tornadoes are most frequent. Although an official location is not defined, the areas in between the Rocky Mountains and Appalachian Mountains are the areas usually associated with it.
Tornado geography
Although no state is entirely free of tornadoes, they are most frequent in the plains between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. The state where strong twisters most commonly occur is Oklahoma. When all tornadoes are taken into account, however, Florida has the highest density of tornado occurrence in the country. Nearly all of Florida's tornadoes are weak, short-lived, and not produced by supercell thunderstorms that originate from cumulonimbus clouds; Oklahoma has the highest occurrence of such "classic" supercellular tornadoes. In contrast, the Northeast and West tend to be the least tornado-prone regions in the United States. The Netherlands have more tornadoes per area than Oklahoma or Florida, but because the absolute number of tornadoes is small, intense tornadoes are infrequent.
Definition
Although Tornado Alley is generally considered to be in the areas of the Central United States, no official definition of the term has actually been produced by the National Weather Service. According to the National Severe Storms Laboratory FAQ, "Tornado Alley" is a term created by the media to refer to areas that have greater numbers of tornadoes. There are several ideas of what Tornado Alley is, but those ideas are the result of the different criteria used to refer to it.
The most common definition of tornado alley is the location of where the strongest tornadoes occur most frequently. In the United States that location is from northern Texas, northward through western Oklahoma and Kansas, and eastern Colorado and through Nebraska into south-eastern South Dakota, southern Minnesota and western Iowa. Tornadoes are experienced to the east of this region. , however, they do not occur with the frequency as they do in states to the west. This also is the case extending northward into North Dakota and the Canadian Prairies.
Time of year
Variations
The nickname "Dixie Alley" is sometimes used for the areas in the southeastern U.S.—notably the lower Mississippi Valley and the upper Tennessee Valley—which are particularly vulnerable to strong tornadoes. More people have been killed by tornadoes in this particular region than those of the Great Plains because of the higher population density in the southeastern United States. The term Dixie Alley is used extensively by The Weather Channel.
Impact
In the heart of tornado alley, building codes are often stricter than those for other parts of the U.S., requiring strengthened roofs and more secure connections between the building and its foundation. Other common precautionary measures include the construction of storm cellars, and the installation of tornado sirens. Tornado awareness and media weather coverage are also high.
Some studies suggest that there are also smaller tornado alleys located across the United States.
See also
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